


Hold the Knife and Twist

by writinginthedust



Category: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 07:39:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17720954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writinginthedust/pseuds/writinginthedust
Summary: A Nesta angst piece set after ACOWAR and ACOFAS.





	Hold the Knife and Twist

She didn’t know the name of the male fucking her.

He’d murmured it to her at some point in the evening but it had drifted into her ear and out of her mind and now danced somewhere in the wind like all the others she’d heard.

Nesta was not a collector of names. She was also not a collector of males, no matter what the whispers said. To be a collector meant a want to keep something and cherish it. She didn’t want these males for forever and she had no desire to add them to a glass display case in her mind.

They were little more than mayflies; living for a night and gone by morning and she saw herself as lucky if she didn’t see them again.

At first, when Nesta’s eyes held life and her mind felt whole, the males acted like they wanted to be hers. They saw her invitations as a declaration of some deeply hidden affection and they reeked of the scent of the thrill that they had been chosen.

They saw her as a female of some regard, someone they would gladly pair with, gladly _seen_ to be paired with and for a while it sparked a long-buried feeling hidden in her chest. The want to be wanted.

After a time, Nesta could sort out those whose thrill was due to being selected by the High Lady’s sister. They held a belief that she was somehow their invitation into a new life and an introduction to the Inner Circle.

It was those ones, the ones that not so innocently enquired about Feyre and their awful High Lord that she treated with the most disdain.  

They looked through Nesta and so she looked through them. Poisonous promises were dipped into their ears during the night and then by morning she declared she had said no such things. They were using each other after all, her and these nameless males. There was no need to soothe their insecurities.

But there was a grief that rotted her from the inside. It hurt to know that she was seen as a key to unlock a door, a door that was locked to her, even though those who shared her blood and bone stood on the other side.

The male that was currently fucking her shifted his body and clutched her leg higher. Nesta gasped and threw back her head as he hit a place inside her body that allowed those thoughts to fly from the cage of her mind.

The moment never lasted long. The thoughts came flying back on silent wings.

Nesta encouraged all of the male’s desire for her. Any with a desire to be close to her sister’s fame and wealth she could discard.

It was the _other_ complication that she couldn’t bury as easily.

The first time she’d noticed it was with a fair-haired male with pale skin and a slender build. He had scented himself with a cologne of spice and vanilla and the deep jade brocade he wore was inlaid with gold thread and set with gold buttons.

Nesta recognised quality and wealth, despite all that had happened that hadn’t changed but with her new senses came new observations. His scent changed when she propositioned him and his chest rose and fell with deepening breaths.

He desired Nesta and she desired to forget.

They left the tavern and stepped into the evening air and while she drew her cloak he looked up into the sky.

If some male fae wanted to gaze at stars that was up to him. She hadn’t the time or patience to stargaze and she wasn’t about to encourage romantic gestures.

But it happened again. Each male would step outside into the air and glance upwards, half in fear and half in expectation.

It was the sixth time, as they stepped onto stones dark grey and mottled with rain, that she snapped.

“What are you looking for?”

He flinched, cut by the tone of her words. When she looked up, she could see nothing there but the darkening night sky. His reply made her stomach twist into shapes.

“The General.”

The male currently above her groaned, the skin of their bodies slick against each other and she reached up to his deep red hair and yanked it with her fingers. The groan grew deeper, a rumbling in his chest that reverberated through hers and she pressed her mouth to his. His hips snapped harder.

All the males who visited her were long limbed and slender. Their skin was always pale and their hair was never dark. Their eyes were never dark.

Amren could sneer all she liked but there was no truth to say that Nesta wasn’t picky. She was incredibly selective of the company she kept.

At first the males she chose dressed in sapphires and silvers or wore mother of pearl links and silken shirts. They were high fae and visitors from other Courts. Nesta soon found that they weren’t satisfied with a night, that they wanted her time as well as her body.

In the end she had no choice. Nesta had to select the ones that knew they were being used but that just didn’t care.

This male inside her now had told her what she didn’t want to know.

“You’re Nesta Archeron,” he had said earlier, as though by stating her name she would understand.

“And?” she had asked lowly into his ear, her breasts pressed against his arm.

His mouth opened to reply.

_You’re a witch, you’re cursed, you are an unnatural creature of the Cauldron, you reek of hate and bloodshed, you’re the pathetic sister of our most glorious High Lady. You should have died. It would have been better for everyone if you had died._

These were all the things she expected him to say but what came out was worse. 

"You're his."

Her hands made her way to the males’ backside and she sunk her fingers into his flesh, urging him on. Faster, she wanted to beg. Fuck me into oblivion, take it all away.

She moved her legs, indicating that she wanted to turn them and wrenched her mouth away. With a twist to their bodies and his hands on her hips aiding her, they flipped until she was astride him, his body still buried deep within her.

Earlier in the tavern she wanted to claw at her own face when he spoke those words. She wanted to scrape and shred away this version of herself until she found the Nesta within, a version that was unripe. I am no one’s, she wanted to scream, I am barely my own.

Instead she placed her delicate fingers on his chin and tilted his face to hers, kissed his lips and made her sweet promises of how the evening would unfold.

But her mind was already in the dark. She had been her father’s daughter before she had been her own, she had been Feyre’s sister before she had been her own and then Tomas, with the way he tore into her skirts, had tried to make her his in a different way.

The Cauldron succeeded.

It destroyed her body and left a rotting corpse that had floated in the depths of its belly. What emerged wasn’t hers.

Then they became _theirs._ Her and Elain were discussed like objects; who had to keep them, who they belonged to, who would get them to open up. Elain a softly opening flower while Nesta was a fist.

There was a time when she would have uncurled her fingers but she’d already opened too far, she’d already given too much of herself to someone who didn’t want to see the heart she cradled in her palm.

Her time, her mind, her heart and her thoughts. She had almost gifted them all away. This world seemed to believe it could decide who she gifted them to so she took her body and finally did what she pleased with it.

The male below her was breathing hard. He was close to finishing and she could feel the pressure build within her. His hands kept pace on her hips as her thighs rocked.

His blue eyes met hers and she quickly looked away.

It was all a lie.

Nesta had already given her body away when she decided to die with _him._ She imagined their skeletons long after the magic swallowed them, bone tangled with bone, clutched together in an eternal embrace. If there would even have been bones. Maybe they would have been piles of ashes, all the fire within them both extinguished.

_Give him your love,_ something had sung to her at that moment. _Give him all your dreams and your fears and he will make them his._

Despite the blood and the terror of the battlefield the melody had chanted through her skin. _You will be his._

But in this new world she wanted to be Nesta. She didn’t want to be a daughter or a sister. She didn’t want to be a fiancée or a lover. She didn’t just want to be known as _his_ , as though she was an eighth siphon and not a person in her own right.

She was the one to hold the knife and twist.

Nesta moved quicker until both her and the male were panting, delirious for air. Her calls were growing louder and desperate, there was sensation inside and around her and it was like she was floating. Her fingers dug into his shoulders to find purchase and she could feel the clicking of his bones.

Bones weren’t the only thing that snapped that night. If Cassian knew he never showed it. Nesta wondered if he’d tried to carve it out of himself like she had.

The male twisted them so that Nesta was once again flat on the bed. He reared up on his haunches, the width of his legs splaying hers further apart and he pulled her towards him until they finally tipped over the edge to the oblivion she’d been searching for.

Afterwards she’d let him decide, he could stay or leave. Either way she would act as usual, turning to her side and curling up like a child ready to enjoy sleep with a clear, sated mind.

But tonight it was different. She’d been preoccupied. Tonight, her demons had crept into the bed with her.

They had left the tavern, her and this stranger, and he’d looked to the stars as they all did. Maybe there was something in his reaction, maybe she could sense something was amiss or maybe tonight she had an urge to see the endless black after all.

The sky above Velaris was never more beautiful then at night. It swirled with ebony and indigo and was embedded with cluster upon cluster of shining stars. The shape that loomed on the roof of the building next to the tavern was a hulking one, made even more impressive by outstretched wings. It looked as though there were seven red stars in the sky.

There had been nights when Nesta looked into blue or green eyes and wondered what desire would look like in hazel. She wondered what a night would be like if wings closed around her to protect her from the cruelty of the world and the cruelty that she had helped put into it. Would he, she wondered, try to remove the knife she had stuck into her own chest.

Would he see that she’d pushed the blade in too deep and that she couldn’t pull it out on her own?

_I will find you in the next world – the next life. And we will have that time._

The figure on the roof had stood motionless and monitoring, a challenge to Nesta that she didn’t know how to accept in a game she didn’t know how to play.

_Your sisters love you, I don’t know why._

The words were small cuts along her skin but they bled anyway.

She looked away and led another male through the paved streets to the place she pretended to call home.

Nesta took her longing and buried it with the silver thread that had been woven around heart. The knife she’d used to cut it with shone brightly in her mind, back firmly in its place between her ribs.

She held the knife and twisted


End file.
